What an awesome Summer of Code project! I wish opportunities had been around when I was learning to program. I remember constantly looking for open source projects to contribute to, but each had such a high bar for entry that there was no low-hanging-fruit that I could cherry-pick (sic) to get involved.

While it's certainly useful to learn by rolling projects from the ground up, you can learn a whole lot more by contributing to an established project and experiencing how their code standards, review process, etc. all feel in comparison to other projects. One big thing I lacked was simply having someone say "We write static functions LIKE THIS because they have THAT ROLE within the scope of this project."